The IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy has rotated its officers. Welcome to all the newly posted officials. Heather Hinton takes over as Chair, and at long last, there is a treasurer, Tom Chen. Also, the TC is now one of the sponsors of a new conference on email security and anti-spam research (CEAS).

The computing world moves on, bloated by spam email and fraught with the daily security alerts. Now that we have new legislation affecting spam, where's the beef? Have you seen less annoying email or more? I'm running at about 10:1, and the anti-spam filters used by my ISP tend to discriminate against my relatives. Perhaps the new conference will elicit research results to help us all.

This month's book review theme is about attacking software. It is an endless subject, and there surely will be more to be said on both sides of the battle.

I invite any of you who have interests in following a particular security area to become a regular reporter to Cipher. Intrusion detection, cryptography, network protocols, etc. are areas where good summaries would be well-received.

Communicate safely,

Hilarie Orman
Cipher Editor
cipher-editor @ ieee-security.org